Vibrant Lament
by Kylara-Jade
Summary: A Literature Assignment that can be taken as the romance between Darcy's parents set modern day, or alternatively that of Georgiana.  Because isn't it always true, in some respect, that opposites attract?


_**Okay, So this was a school assignment that I thought could be applied to Darcy's parents – No names are mentioned, and neither are the kids, but I still think it kinda fits (and I wanted to post it anyway)**_

_**It could also be seen as Georgiana's romance, if it takes your fancy**_

_**Enjoy!**_

White.

Black on White.

Predominantly White.

It was so her. And yet not.

I looked down, away from that blinding white. Looking down to black. I tilted my head slightly as I studied the reflective surface of my shoes. A face blinked back up at me, distorted and disfigured. Perhaps a closer truth than a mirror might have given me.

Black as a colour is not bad, it just has a bad habit of making an appearance in the worst possible places and having a bad connotation.

Like thunderclouds.

The lettering on bills.

A lawyer's cloak.

The sinister glare of a raven.

If anything, I was black personified.

I do not mean to say I was evil. No, nothing of the sort. Just distorted and commonly misunderstood. I suppose in some ways I was deficient. Lacking.

The absence of colour.

She was different from me. Where I was black, she was white. Bright, sparkling white. White as a colour represents goodness. Goodness and purity. Always lighting up scenarios in the best possible way. Always related to the best possible things.

Like the dove from Noah's Ark.

That first light dusting of snow in winter.

A new born lamb.

The sweetness of a cube of sugar.

As I was not evil, neither was she perfect. Though so very, very, close in my probably biased opinion. And she compensated for my deficiency.

Where I was the absence of colour, she was the dizzying spiral of a colourful spectrum into that one shining colour.

Black and White.

White and Black.

They characterised us and our existence. We were them and they were us. They were there at our beginning. The brought us together and bound us. And they were here, now, at our end.

_My brow was furrowed, focussing on the black. Fingers moved agilely, and yet not agilely enough. From sharp to flat and back again. Unmelodious and dissonant, yet right. The creation of something shouldn't exist for its purpose of entertainment and enjoyment. A diminished seventh and then reaching for the final chord, as my eyes flicked from the black below to the black in front of me. Check and double check. Little finger extended – and I missed. The finale incomplete, missing that final, odd white note._

_Unattained._

_A light touch. Feather light. Soft and pure. A hand, not my own, reaches for that final white note. Clear and perfect it shattered through the previous darkness of the piece._

_She smiled, brightly and whitely. With eyes sparkling, full of good humour she spoke._

"_Hello"_

_So simple. yet that word took my breath away, and shone a bright white speck of light into the normality of the darkness that was my day._

"_Hello" I responded._

_She smiled gently. And with that, she was gone, her white scarf trailing whimsically behind her. The scent of white lily-of-the-valley the only proof that she was there, and not some twisted figment of my imagination._

_With that one meeting being alone in the darkness, in the blackness stopped being my be all and end all._

_Black was no longer the centre of my world._

_We met a second time, many months later, in the same place. A flash of white out of the corner of my eye. After months of seeming hallucinations, I refused to turn my head._

_She had shaken my foundations in the smallest amount of time. Heaven sent, yet her unattainability seemingly straight from my personal hell._

_The room seemed to shrink as I walked to and focussed on the anvil of my imagination in the centre of the room. Paper that was previously clutched taunted me as I released it, and readied it to be tainted, pencil at the ready._

_Eyes closed._

_Focussed._

_Try...Trying not to think of her..._

_Eyes open._

_Mood darkened, and no longer focussed as I tried to smother the irrational things I was feeling. And the truth that I was trying so hard to deny._

_The truth of what I was wanting._

_The truth of what some part of me seemed to need._

_With a ferociousness unparalleled I attacked the black. Black was attacked with my left hand, as my right hand created black, transferring the events of my internal battle. Black creating sound. Black recording sound._

_I relaxed into comfort_

_Into black. Into the absence of white. _

_I lost myself in my own being._

_I didn't notice the light presence behind me. The way it had crept into the room unnoticed. All there I could I sense was the echo of the cacophony I was creating in the blackness._

_But I did notice when a lilting melody began to intertwine itself through my harsh chords._

_In a moment of surprise, my hands faltered, left hand slipping from black to white. My right hand dropped my pencil, ceasing the creation of black. My startled eyes met the light eyes of her, a smiling vision in white. Her pale, right hand was splayed elegantly over a higher octave as she played – predominantly white. And white and black became one. Yet black and white were still discernable as separate entities, not mixing and creating grey. Just simply moving as one._

_Balanced in sync._

_Wordlessly she slipped her left hand into my motionless right. We reached an equilibrium, and understanding._

_Black no longer needed to be created on white paper, as white and black engraved itself on my heart._

_And through the dark and light..._

_...We created perfection._

A tear – cold and somehow hard, tracked down my cheek. It fell, melting into the surrounding silence. I blinked as tears blurred my vision, as I looked forward again. White was all I could see.

But White was now gone from my life. The white that remained was merely a phantom of what used to be, a reminder.

And it hurt.

Thinking back over the years we spent together, showed how much I relied on her. We started as distinct opposites, and then that first intertwining. After that, our edges began to dull as we started to create those shades of grey that softened us both.

I looked up, trying to regain the composure that once was.

The sky darkened above me in supposed mimicry of my life, as the sky began to cry in earnest on my behalf. And I didn't care. I stood and let the colourless drench me. And I let the colourlessness wash away my black.

I walked, turning my back on white as well.

I was now nothing, no personification. Just blank. Like how I felt.

And I just walked.

My feet carried me back to that building, that room, that space. I ran my hands over that black and white that we both once occupied. With a deep breath I sat. Left on black, right on white. Like how it used to be. How it still should have been, but wasn't.

The first note rang out purely in the silence. A creation flowed from my soul to my fingers and out into the open air. Somehow she was within me, white working its way through my very being. I let instinct win, and let the music play itself.

And in that mixture of black and white, I found not only shades of grey. But something else. Something more.

I had always been fixated on the black and white. Tears fell for every memory I had of white, and of her. A tear fell for every note. And I allowed my feelings, the feelings crying out so deep within me to move from the grayscale I had believed my life to be into something more. Something brighter.

The piece called for her, embodied her and something more.

I moved into colour as I cried.

Because of her.

Analysis

Vibrant Lament is a story of losing a loved one, and how remembrance can lead the way to moving forward and onto something new.

I chose the title as a kind of paradox. The lament of loss is, in general, no way colourful. And neither does the story start that way. Instead it focuses on things that would not usually be classified as colourful. I used black and white as my motifs throughout the piece to show that sometimes things that seem so different, so opposite, can actually be the same. The use of the piano is symbolic of this. Black and white coexist yet create the one thing – sound.

The use of black and white being related to common everyday objects explores the idea that we find the people we know in so many places where they physically do not exist. Memories of loved ones can sometimes be triggered by the strangest things.

The use of flashback in the story creates the necessary melancholy for the situation. It gives the reader a deeper understanding of the connection the narrator felt with the girl.

The fact that the girl has no name keeps the story broad, as it has no purpose. We are looking through the narrator's perspective, and what he feels for her has nothing to do with her name. Basically, to him "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

The scarce use of dialogue highlights the fact that the main scene is merely contemplation, and a stream of thought. It gives the reader a sense being able to see the most private thoughts of the narrator. This means that reader will have no doubt of the truth of the narrator's words and allows them to delve deeper into the emotions of the narrator.

Again the stream of thoughts is made known by the use of short incomplete sentences, and consecutive sentences that repeat part of a previous sentence. This was done to mimic the thought stream, as thoughts are never orderly and continuously repeat themselves.

The use of colour at the end of the story, ties in the vibrancy of the title. it shows that for every cloud there is a silver lining. As the girl is gone, the narrator is less fixed on what they were, and allows her dizzying spiral that continues within him to slow back to a spectrum of colour. This shows the music that they used to create was a mixture of them, while the music the narrator now creates is her. The colours of their relationship flow through his music, reminding the reader that there is always a way to remember something, yet move on.

_**I haven't got a mark on this yet, or feedback, so please let me know what you think **___

_**I think I can manage a couple of cyber-cookies...and seriously, I make good cookies!**_

_**Kylara-Jade**_

_**xxx**_


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